I’ve been copying the travel comments from the newsletters from a friend into a file. I edited out people’s names and put in bold the names of places, but otherwise it’s as he wrote it. What do you think about this lifestyle? I think I once would have aspired to live this way. Even if I didn’t want to fly this much when I flew, I think I would have[…] Keep reading →

News pieces about Kool and Newport cigarette brands targeting blacks tend to portray the brands and their advertising as nefarious and racist. A quick search found stories like How the tobacco industry targeted Black Americans with menthol smokes, Why Big Tobacco Targeted Blacks With Ads for Menthol Cigarettes, Study: Newport Marketed Cigarettes Directly to Black Kids, and Newport, the top cigarette brand for black Americans, is aggressively targeting youths. Maybe[…] Keep reading →

Things that are compostable aren’t labeled. They’re plants and fungi. Corn cobs and peach pits don’t say compostable. Things that are labeled “compostable” are manufactured and generally need special composting facilities. Even if where you live has them, they required manufacturing. It’s likely doof. People lived for 300,000 years with only things that biodegraded. Whatever convenience you think some salad bowl labeled “compostable” brings, it isn’t clean, green, or renewable[…] Keep reading →

Please tell me there’s another way to see it: The way we as a culture consume doof and chase comfort and convenience over meaning and purpose, people using heroin, fentanyl, and other serious drugs aren’t an aberration from our culture, they’re it’s future. They aren’t behaving qualitatively different than, say, someone who buys from McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, or other doof place. They differ only quantitatively. I don’t blame any of[…] Keep reading →

People act like humans managing our population is some new idea. People have been able to manage our population as long as we’ve been human. When there’s more energy and resources, people have bigger families. America’s westward expansion followed by its extracting and burning fossil fuels created the material conditions for fast growth. In westward expansion, arable land was a proxy for energy since plants converted sunlight into energy people[…] Keep reading →

I closed my account with Con Ed since I wasn’t using their power, but apparently Americans are too entitled and can’t stop themselves. They’re complaining and unhappy. I wish I could help them enjoy life more, but the technology they thought brought them comfort and convenience seems to have made them less resilient, happy, healthy, or safe and more addicted, dependent, and petulant. I prefer freedom to addiction, which I[…] Keep reading →

You probably know the Sackler name, but if you don’t, the Sackler family pushed the opiate Oxycontin on an unsuspecting public, playing the largest role in the opiate crisis that has led to millions of addictions and deaths. They avoid admitting wrongdoing and avoid prosecution through legal wrangling that looks like it’s abusing the legal system in a way rich people can. Meanwhile, doof makers addict people with substances derived[…] Keep reading →

ChatGPT is surprising everyone with what it can do, how far beyond expectations, and in so many areas. Where will artificial intelligence go next? What will it do? Whom will it affect and how? It’s hard for people who didn’t live when people viewed beating a human at chess as absolutely impossible for computers, let alone playing a decent game. Today we can only conceive of chess as something computers[…] Keep reading →

Despite using zero watts over more than a year, I’ve been paying over $20 per month for an electric bill. Part of it was to a power company that uses more wind and solar that charged me a monthly fee of another $6 or so. The other part was $17 a month to Con Ed, the power company, simply for being connected to the grid, not even using power. I[…] Keep reading →